"You repress almost everything to produce a building," states Daniel Libeskind during a long and wide-ranging conversation with the architectural historian Gillian Darley in the context of the exhibition Childhood ReCollections: Memory in Design at the Roca London Gallery.

"Everything is repressed because it has to fit into the context, it has to be stylized, it has to appeal to clients, it has to be normal," he contends. "But I always thought, try to show what has been repressed in architecture. It’s very difficult because people don’t like it."

Their conversation touches on a number of Libeskind's central concerns and makes frequent reference to both his biography and his oeuvre. Here are some of the highlights (check out the full video below):



On his childhood:

• "I was lucky to have that experience of... the mythology of New York, which is arriving by boat as an immigrant. You know, woken up, 4 o’clock in the morning by my mother with my sister, go up, wake up, 'you’re going to see New York.' And you stand on the deck, and really there’s nothing to prepare you for it even though you’re 13 years old and you’ve seen movies, you’ve seen pictures, postcards. Nothing to prepare you for the feeling of an immigrant, seeing that skyline. It’s just something impossible to explain because it’s a phantom which is real. You can look at – it’s not a believable skyline – but the power of seeing it from the water, from a boat that has been on water for weeks."
• In Poland, Libeskind's mother worked as a seamstress specializing in brassieres before they emigrated first to Israel and then to the United States. He speculates on how spending time in her "hovel" of shop subconsciously influenced his aesthetic architect: "...My repulsion to blobby forms, you know – seeing my mother’s delicate materials flowing and the braziers ands all the girdles, you know, that must have cured me forever from, you know, Zaha’s brilliance. She’s a brilliant architecture but had a different childhood."

On the Jewish Museum in Berlin:

• Initially, the Jewish Museum was going to just be a space commemorating the Shoah within a larger museum.
• "You know, I didn’t ever go to a museum, or an archive or a library to read about the Shoah, the Holocaust. I have a big library. I never studied it. It was just part of my experience."

• "I grew up in a void. It’s true, there nothing left. There was really nothing."

• Paraphrasing Jacques Derrida: "“The holocaust plus then, soon after, the bombing of Hiroshima, changed all of architecture… the world has been affected, in some way, which is ineffable, it’s not easy to say how the world has been affected by these events, but it has."

• Libeskind considers the museum a "completion" of  Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished opera Moses und Aron: "…it stops, there’s an aporia, when Moses calls to God, ‘What does it all mean?’ and Schoenberg did not write further… But I thought I could make a building that could complete this opera in the echoes of the footsteps of the visitors as they walk across the void…"

• Until the very last minute, Libeskind planned to have no light in the "Holocaust tower," thinking "Nobody can bring light to the Holocaust, there’s no light.” He decided to add an oblique point on the upper edge of the tower after hearing the testimony of a survivor, who attributed her survival to a crack of light she saw while locked in one of the cattle cars heading to a concentration camp.

• "That was kind of my transformation, in a way, because I really didn’t see light and then this account gave me light and then I understood that without hope you can’t build anything. You might as well not bother building anything."

On the World Trade Center site (and memorials, in general):

• "You can’t think of just a contemporary audience. I always thought, who are you building for? ...Who’s your client? Client is someone else, some stranger who’s coming, who doesn’t know anything about anything, who hasn’t even been in the city, doesn’t speak the language, he’s a foreigner, an immigrant, a refugee..."
• "[I thought] what would my father… want to see on Ground Zero? Certainly not the gleaming buildings.. I thought it was about the realm of the public."
• "If you have a trauma and you repress it, it’s going to come to haunt you. It’s going to do something to you, something bad, something violent at some point."
• "I think it’s important not to repress the trauma. It’s important to express it. And sometimes the violence of a building is not something comforting. You know, it should not be comforting. Why should it be comforting? We should not be comfortable in this world, you know, seeing what is going on around."
• Paraphrasing Rainer Maria Rilke: “If you stand on the ground and don’t feel that you’re rotating on a sphere across the darkness of the cosmos, you’re asleep. So I’m always surprised that people think architecture should be comforting, should be nice, should appeal to your domesticity. Because the space, and the world is different. And architecture is always telling a story, in my view, its a story-telling thing."
• "Architecture is a field of repression."